Fruitcake Time

Batch #2
25 Nov. 2017

I know, I know. Nobody likes fruitcakes. I don't either, normally. But these? These I baked from a recipe my grandmother used throughout my boyhood--and my mother, too. I'm sure--as I've written here other years--that Grandma Osborn did not invent this recipe; she no doubt took it from one of those magazines that used to be called "women's magazines." Times change. But not the fruitcakes.

I try to make them just as my mother wrote down the recipe for me years ago. Okay ... a few changes. I like dried apricots, so I use a cup of them instead of a second cup of candied fruit. For years I used Egg Beaters instead of the four eggs the recipe calls for (not this year: Egg Time!). But--for the most part--it's just as Mom wrote it down.

Mom would make them during the Thanksgiving Break (she was a teacher); I've been doing the same--even though I'm retired now and could make them Any Old Damn Time I Want To! But ... tradition. After they cool, I'll wrap them in foil and store them in the fridge until it's time to bestow them on (grateful?) neighbors and family.

This is the only kind of fruitcake I can abide. It's a "white" one--none of that dark, dank stuff of Holiday Legend, stuff that people have been passing around, uneaten, since Joseph and Mary rejected the one offered by one of the Less-Than-Wise Men. (The gold, by comparison, looked pretty good.)

I've posted the recipe on this site on other years, so if you want it, you can Google "dawnreader fruitcake" and probably find it quite easily.

It takes about an hour from prep time to clean-up. Baking (at 325) adds about and hour-twenty more. Oh, make sure you soften the butter ahead of time: You need to cream it with the brown and white sugar. (I just realized another change I make: I use soy butter!)

The batch you see is the second group of five I made; I baked their older siblings yesterday. Now I have ten. (Math matters!)

Joyce and I will resist the temptation to "try one"--you know, just to make sure it's all right to share with others? Whenever we do that--"try one"--we end up eating the whole damn thing in the kind of frenzy that would alarm a shark.

Anyway, I've got other baking to do between now and the holidays, but I like this part of it about as well as anything. The smell. A magic-carpet ride back to boyhood, a carpet I seem to enjoy riding more and more as I distance myself chronologically more and more from boyhood.

Wanna take bets on whether or not one of these dudes survives the afternoon?